Hong Kong: Trend Micro said that its threat intelligence infrastructure – Smart Protection Network (SPN) blocked over 94 billion cyber threats in 2021. Trend Micro’s SPN was able to stop 94.2 billion cyber threats heading for consumers, government and business customers in the last year.
The volume of detections represents a 42% increase in the number of detections recorded in 2020. It reveals that attacks surged by over 53 billion in the second half of 2021 after Trend Micro blocked 41 billion threats in 1H 2021.
Over five trillion threat queries detected threats, which is a 36% year-on-year increase from queries in 2020. Trend Micro’s SPN leverages over 250 million sensors across the broadest attack surface globally to proactively protect organizations and individuals faster.
“Trend Micro detects threats across endpoints, mobile, servers, IoT/IIoT, home networks, messaging, network, web and cloud environments,” said Jon Clay, VP- Threat Intelligence for Trend Micro.
“That’s a testament to our continuous effort to expand attack surface protections and improve our advanced detection technologies deployed to 500,000 commercial and government accounts and millions of consumer customers. But it also underscores the mounting threat from bad actors, as outlined in our 2022 predictions report,” added Clay.
Despite a double-digit surge in detected cyber-threats from 2020 to 2021, Trend Micro blocked 66% fewer ransomware attacks over the period, reinforcing the theory that these threats are becoming more targeted.
More ransomware attacks are being blocked in earlier stages before being deployed, which is a contributing factor for the decrease. Over 14 million attacks were proactively stopped in 2021 before they could impact customers.
Even with Trend Micro’s comprehensive cloud-first protection capabilities. The company has urged security teams to be prepared for another onslaught of threats in 2022.
The cybersecurity company predicts that IoT systems, global supply chains, cloud environments and DevOps functions will come under increasing scrutiny from attackers over the coming year.
Enhanced risk-based patching, XDR, server hardening, Zero Trust, network monitoring and DevSecOps practices will be critical to prevent spiralling cyber risk in 2022.